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Description

The Revue Cinema Presents:Designing the Movies: Withnail & I (1987)

Thursday, January 12, 2017, 7:00PM

Guest programmed and hosted by freelance culture writer and film critic Nathalie Atkinson, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, Designing the Movies explores the talents whose names may be less familiar but whose work in production design, art direction, costume and set decoration is intrinsic to creating the world of their films.

Feel better about the post-holiday blahs by watching the only place more desolate than wintry January in Toronto: Withnail & I. Doors will open at 6:00pm because the first thing we do is have cider. Ice in the cider.

After the movie, stay for the on-stage conversation about the film’s exploration of masculinity and its representation of the waning Youthquake era (and Withnail’s coat!) with Atkinson and special guest Stuart Henderson, author of the award-winning book Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s. In addition to being the director of development and a creative producer with documentary film company 90th Parallel Productions, Henderson has worked as a cultural history professor at several top research institutions in Canada, has a PhD from Queen’s University and held postdoctoral fellowships at York and McMaster Universities, and has worked as an culture critic for PopMatters, Exclaim! and the CBC.

About the Film

By all the natural laws of science, chemistry and logic, the titular anti-hero of this satirical masterpiece Withnail & I should not make it to the end of the movie. But he is not just anyone. He is out-of-work part-time actor and full-time alcoholic Withnail, who eschews Advil and instead resorts to glugs of lighter fluid to avoid alcohol withdrawal. Along with roommate Marwood, Withnail escapes for the weekend from the squalor of his London flat to the inhospitable stone cottage in the Lake District belonging to lascivious Uncle Monty. Naturally, the bone-chilling English damp follows the pair. It is a rueful coda of friendship and the 1960s, a fitting parallel for post-bacchanal January lamenting the end of another year and the beginning of a new one – hilarious, poignant and almost unbearably melancholy.

About the Series

Film series often focus on cast or director, or link by common subject themes; this ongoing series instead considers the crucial contributions of below-the-line craft in both popular favourites and forgotten gems from across the decades, genres and eras. Guest programmed and hosted by freelance culture writer and film critic Nathalie Atkinson, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, Designing the Movies explores the talents whose names may be less familiar but whose work in production design, art direction, costume and set decoration is intrinsic to the look and world of their films.

With expert introductions and special guest Q&As, Designing the Movies covers the films of production pioneers like William Cameron Menzies (who invented the role, if not the term), Cedric Gibbons, Lyle Wheeler and Canadian Richard Day and their costume contemporaries Howard Greer, Edith Head, Adrian Travis, Banton and Orry-Kelly as well as more recent counterparts like Ken Adam, Roger Christian, Ferdinando Scarfiotti, Dante Ferretti, Adam Stockhausen, Sarah Greenwood and Catherine Martin, Sandy Powell, Jenny Beavan, Colleen Atwood, Wendy Chuck and Michael Wilkinson.

As longtime Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Robert Boyle defined it, production design is the physical environment in which the action and the meaning of a film takes place, interpreting the psychology and emotion of a screenplay and relaying that in visual form. So too the integral, at times misunderstood, role that costume plays in storytelling and bringing characters to life. The screenings are an invitation to reconsider films from a new or different angle, the invisible work made visible. - Nathalie Atkinson